Pulpetti: short reviews and articles on pulps and paperbacks, adventure, sleaze, hardboiled, noir, you name it. You can write to Juri Nummelin at juri.nummelin@gmail.com.

Friday, May 12, 2017

Just a quick update: election, new books, coming books, a beautiful cover for one

Just announcing I'm not dead yet, though the latest blog post is from, what, two months back! Can this really be? Time flies really fast, doesn't it?

There have been things going on around here, that's for sure.

I ran for the city council here in Turku, Finland, in the ranks of the Left Alliance and was elected, almost to my surprise, vice member (or deputy member, I'm not really sure what the right word is). So far, I haven't done much in this official post, but we'll see.

My publishing house, Helmivyö, has put out new books. One of them is my own "The Short Introduction to Trash/Pulpy Literature" (Roskakirjallisuuden lyhyt historia; it's a tour around the world, focusing mainly on the United States), and one of them is a volume of the the collected short fiction of Kaarlo Bergbom, Finnish writer from the 1860s. There are only four stories, one of them being a Biblical fantasy, one being an almost Westernish story of an old career criminal living as a hermit, and two being psychological short stories. You can check the books out here. (The site is understandably in Finnish.)

My hands have been full of work, and besides all of the above I've been writing and compiling my own books. I had to postpone one that was supposed to come out next Fall, but the book about the film versions of classic and new Finnish literature is still in the works. It's a sequel to the book I wrote earlier, about film versions of known and forgotten books around the world, not only in Finland.

And there will also be a collection of fairy tales for adults I edited. It's called "The Hundred Years of Sleep" (or "Dreams"; Sadan vuoden unet in Finnish), according to the shorty story of Johanna Venho that was simply wonderful. I wish someone possibly in the publishing business reading this blog would get excited and ask for a translation sample of some of the stories. Check out the cover above, it's by Charlie Bowater.

I haven't been reading much hardboiled/noir/pulp/sleaze literature, as I have been deeply immersed in my work, but here's hoping I can squeeze some in during the Summer. So far, it looks bad...

Recycle Literature has always written and published, but what is it? The final answer is difficult to give, but it can try to approach, and this is exactly what makes pulp-researcher Juri Nummelin in his book A Brief History of Garbage literature . The text is based in the autumn of 2016 held a seminar lecture junk literature.

Later [in the 1990s] was born pulp-literary definition is loose and encompasses many things, but the pulp magazine's original definition is tight. According to the pulp magazine should be of a certain size, usually 128-page and 18 cm wide and 25 cm high, roughly European B5standardia. The magazine should be printed on paper for bad, worse than newsprint. For this leaves the name: pulp-sanahan means pulp. printed on paper leaves better known under the names slick or glossy. These included, for example, Saturday Evening Post, and Harper's, who also published the pulp magazines of better quality literature from well-known makers. Interestingly, this of course is that the slick magazines literature today is much less known than the pulp journals.Generally, pulp-lehdiksi is calculated only for those magazines where the main focus was fiction, but the investigator Jess Nevins has fallen pulp-lehdiksi also true crime magazines, which were published skandalöösejä stuff of real life murders and other crimes. They have been in the history of pulp magazines often denigrated, but they were the same size as the actual pulp-lehdetkin and often also popular. The same is true also for women in the romance magazines such as Love Story, which are often sold to more than the histories of annealed sci-fi or horror magazines. Romantic pulp magazines, however, focused collectors is not and no one has written their history. In the same way denigrated is also länkkärilehtiä, even though some of them were really popular and long-lived.